movies playing out in real life. are about in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on a special edition of the big picture americans on all sides of the political spectrum are having a tough time understanding all the intricacies of obamacare will sort through the nitty gritty of president obama's landmark legislation and talk about what obamacare means for you later in the show we'll talk to dan balz of the washington post about his new book collision twenty twelve which looks back at the election of two thousand and twelve and gives us a glimpse at the future of elections in america and we'll revisit my conversations with great minds with dr cornel west author professor and democratic intellectual

and no for you my new book the crash of twenty sixteen the plot to destroy america and what we can do to stop it is now available for preorder at all on line retailers like amazon dot com and at your local bookstore so go check it out. here to help us sort through the nitty gritty of obamacare is karen davenport director of health policy of the national women's law center and ethan rome executive director of health care for america now. great to have you both with us tonight it's good to be let's just start at the beginning and in fact karen let me begin with you what happens in october what happens in january what is it that people need to know about and get ready for i realize it's a huge question you see there's a couple of land mileposts santa starting october first people can enroll in health coverage through health insurance exchange our health insurance marketplace things . they sometimes be called or their state may have

a different name like california it's called covering california for example. and they can also if they have low income in their state has chosen to expand coverage the medicaid program they can also enroll in medicaid for coverage to start january one as well in both cases where they are they sign up for private coverage the exchanges where they enroll in the medicaid program if their state is doing that coverage will start january first and that's the next milestone in addition to coverage starting a number of important insurance reforms come into play starting january first for example as you were just mentioning people with preexisting conditions today can't necessarily get into the insurance marketplace they will be guaranteed coverage insurance plans won't be able to turn them down at that point. and. apropos of this when i when i was a week or so ago we were going to the subject of a lot of a lot of feedback as you can imagine one was an e-mail from

a friend of mine. who pointed out that he lives in michigan and michigan has said no thanks to two medicaid money. he said if you live in one and a half times a year add or below poverty or whatever you know where you would be eligible for medicaid and you live in a state where that medicaid eligibility has not been extended so there won't be an obamacare. medicaid option available to you as there will be in all the other states what do you do you go in and buy it on the exchange and then get a tax credit is that the option and if so how does that work there is a medical need to do things which one is that for the people there are some people that are going to be that will be caught between the eligibility for the medicaid expansion if it's not occur. in some of those folks the period where you come into the folks between two hundred one hundred thirty eight percent of poverty would be able to purchase and. there are folks who will get caught and that's why it's so

important that we continue to fight in these states to expand medicaid because otherwise it's putting pressure on overburdened community health centers and hospitals that it's continuing to put pressure and which is particularly frustrating because in a state like michigan or any others that are a set of folks the way to think about this was that those two things and the first is that it improves health insurance coverage for the eighty five percent of us who have it and the second is that provides coverage for those that don't and it does the through the marketplaces the through medicaid expansion and in the way that it does that is to make coverage affordable. i was just going to add you know people ethan's absolutely right people would be caught in a coverage gap if people should not people should not sort of prejudge where they might fall both because they may end up qualifying for help with tax credits to

purchase coverage in exchange and also because they may already be eligible for the medicaid program and not know it and not be enrolled so you know it's really worth people's time on october first to find out even if their state is not expanding coverage through medicaid to see if they may be able to get coverage either in the new marketplace or in the existing medicaid program it is tough for the people who are caught in that coverage gap that people shouldn't assume they will fall into deeper. because of what i do for a living i'm on all the right wing mailing lists as you can imagine and for some time i've been getting this fairly there's four or five versions of them they all were quite credible but they're just so extreme these viral e-mails that talk about how the i.r.s. is a new police force that just bought a billion dollar it's these acros right they just bought a billion bullets is going to be coming to your home to deter. and whether or not

you have insurance and whether or not your children are vaccinated and if you daughter they don't they're going to and i just kind of blowing this off i thought nobody would take this seriously today on our radio we do i do a three hour radio show every day as well as a t.v. show and on the radio show we did this in the last the third hour and i probably got twenty calls from people asking variations of that dead series i mean people people out there in red state america are getting this and this is the only information they have are their obamacare police is the iris going to show up at your house are there in force in provisions that can actually lead you to go to jail. no no no no i think are the short answers to that. we've certainly heard that go to jail thing a lot too there is starting on january first there is a requirement that people have health insurance there are exceptions for people who are low income or can't find affordable coverage by the way that will be enforced is through our tax system and you know just as you you owe taxes on the income that

you have earned if you do not have health insurance you will penalty and it will be enforced that way not through so many of the other larger kone of measures so basically if you don't have insurance your taxes go up by a much well in the first year it's ninety five dollars or the entire year or one percent of your income whichever is larger that goes up over the next couple years alternately will be two and a half percent of your income so it of course depends how much you make will determine how large your penalty will be you know if there are there are also exceptions for that like if i understand if the cost of health insurance is more than nine percent of your income you don't have to buy insurance and if you and i mean i think but the thing i want to stress is that these are really good questions and they're you know but they relate in part through a narrow slivers of folks and so the main thing is if you. do not have health

insurance. you need to call the call center line that you're going to hear about if you have anybody knocking on your door about health care they're going to be part of the enrollment process they're going to have people doing outreach looking that's happening all over the country even in the red states even in states like texas right where rick perry is doing everything in his power to make sure that no one in his state gets insurance but twenty five percent of the people in the state don't have it but there's a you nor miss national collaborative of hospitals providers insurers health care organizations all working together to reach out to make sure that people know about the program and and how. are people best in another health care is this website. i also again we got a couple calls today from people who said i'm disabled or an elderly or i don't have a lot of money and i literally can't get on the internet one of those people. there

is i mean there's a number of things one is that there will be there will be call centers and they'll be numbers that people are able to call the second is that a lot of those people are already eligible for different programs and so they may have caregivers that they can that they can talk to already so this stuff is not going to be a secret no if you know and it's also you know lots of people are going to be talking to family members who are getting who already have coverage or family members who know about this but i mean if we go back to where you started about about the i.r.s. knocking on your door and all this kind of business right right now there's an enormous amount of misinformation and there's still not a lot of information that's that's that's punching through and that's going to change that's going to change the closer that we get to october first because a lot of people say to me gosh why or why aren't people doing more to broadcast the program and there is there's a lot of educate. and information but the best time to begin that is really close

to tober first because of our talk to you and you say hey that sounds like a great big i really want to roll the best thing this is for me to be able to help you with the role right that in there. there's we talked about one hundred thirty eight percent. of above the level of poverty but there's also programs available for people up to four hundred percent of the poverty level one i think in the united states a family of three at nineteen thousand four hundred a year is the poverty line so that would be for a family of three almost eighty thousand dollars a year if you made anything under that you qualify for tax credits tax credits or where the government writes you a check rather than just more of a tax deduction how does that work and how do people learn about so what that tax credit will do is it will reduce what you know your health insurance plan in terms of premiums a recent study from the kaiser family foundation showed that if people who buy insurance insurance in the individual market today for those folks who qualify for

subsidies the subsidies that cover about two thirds of their health insurance premiums i would say that check directly to the health insurance company or will people have to pay for it out of pocket and at the end i hope they have enough money that at the end of the year they can get it back so they sort of back and part of it will be money going to the health insurance exchange which will then send those subsidies out to the health insurance plans when you're signing here you'll know that you're eligible for help but you won't need to deal with that part of the transaction so you'll need to pay your portion of the premium but that you should deal with the subsidy so you will then you know when you file your taxes for the next year if there's any difference in what you were thinking that you would make versus. what you really made will be some reconciliation but it's should be really pretty seamless and easy for people and one of the ways to find out if you qualify for that or not is to go to your health insurance. change on to their

website or call the call center they can was talking about or even a community based organization where you live that is helping people enroll they can all help you apply your own thank you so much even the. pleasure candidate is great at. technology innovation. developments around. the future

covered. wealthy british style the sun. rises. the market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike's guns are the no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into. couldn't take three. years three. months free. free. free. free. video for your media project a free media. in

the best interest of the news we maybe eleven hundred seventy six days away from the twenty sixteen elections but we are already beginning to get a glimpse at what the twenty sixteen presidential campaign might look like on the democratic side of the aisle all bets are on hillary clinton being the democratic nominee for president although by president joe biden in new york governor andrew cuomo are also on the some pundits short list meanwhile the republican picture isn't so clear chris christie continues to maintain his presidential hopeful status senators rand paul of kentucky marco rubio of florida and ted cruz of texas are also making waves in the presidential pool twenty sixteen presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle will try to avoid the same mistakes made by two thousand and twelve candidates mistakes which in many cases provide prove to be campaign killers and while twenty sixteen hopefuls may look to. two thousand and twelve

election cycle for lessons and advice what can we the people take away from two thousand and twelve as we look ahead to the future of elections in america joining me now for more on that is dan balz veteran political correspondent for the washington post and author of the new book collision twenty twelve obama versus romney and the future of elections in america dan welcome back to the program thank you i just every year like the future of elections in america i mean that's that's well it's also is the portentious the right words it's i mean what we have seen radical changes in our lifetime and how the whole action in fact just in the last generation the last fifteen twenty years and how elections are conducted in the united states what is the biggest of those changes in your well i i think in this in this election there were a number of things that we saw which we are going to continue to see one is in the

kind of the nuts and bolts of politics the way the obama campaign organized itself its use of data mining in analytics and modeling of the electorate all of the technology it put to use to try to develop the most sophisticated get out the vote operation is something that every campaign that's thinking about two thousand and twelve is looking at. but there are other aspects of this one is obviously the rise of super pacs. the role of money in politics is always an issue but i think what we saw in the changes between two thousand and four two thousand and eight and particularly two thousand and twelve is that there is this rise of these super pacs which are aiding particular candidates which are able to take huge individual contributions from people the million two million five million ten million dollars from an individual they have the ability to keep alive a candidate who otherwise might be forced to the sidelines for lack of money and they have the ability to attack and destroy a candidate as mitt romney was able to do at least temporarily with newt gingrich

so that's. another thing i think another aspect of this election that looks to the future. is the changing demographics of this country and you can look at politics from the inside out and you can also look at it from outside in and there were several big forces that in two thousand and twelve i think asserted themselves in a significant way one is the changing demographics which at this point unless the republicans can find a different way of going about it gives a slight wind at the back of the other democrats in presidential elections the other thomas this red blue divide that we talk about it's almost become a cliche in this country we talk about red and blue america and yet i think in this election it showed that red got a little redder and blue got a little bluer and it's one of the reasons we continue to have this kind of paralysis that we see in washington there is you mentioned super pacs working for candidates and you mentioned the obama campaign running a very very sophisticated get out the vote organization. get out the vote is kind of the last part of it i realized that in fact in your book you point out that for

four years they had been working on this thing and made to basically didn't stop and the perpetual campaign really began several lection cycles several presidents ago with really the reagan presidency explicitly but but get out the vote has to follow convince the voters to vote for your guy and how much of the sophisticated technology that your chronicle wing is used to change opinions or to motivate people or in the cases of negative advertising and push polling to demotivate people to encourage them not to even bother showing their albums how much of that is that versus getting people to the polls well it's interesting in part because of the divisions we see there is i think more effort that now goes into motivating your supporters and a little less into persuading people because there are fewer people who can actually be persuaded i mean one of the interesting things we saw in this in this election was i remember i was attending a focus group that peter hart the pollster was conducting for. the university of

pennsylvania's annenberg center this was late in the election probably mid october of two thousand and twelve ten undecided voters quote unquote chosen because they were they said they were undecided as peter went around the room during that two hour conversation it was clear that of those ten undecided voters there were only four people who were truly undecided the most people at this point if you say i'm a republican it's pretty clear where you're going to end up voting and similarly with democrats now having said that the obama campaign spent a lot of money on research on focus groups on a particular project that they called ethno journaling in which they ask people to fill out journals about their financial situation and their sense of economic security all as a way to develop a message that leapfrog over the issue of what do people think about barack obama's handling of the economy and moved it to

a debate that they thought was much more favorable to them versus mitt romney which was which of these two candidates do you think understands your life which of these two candidates do you think will be better for your family not just six months from now but two years from now or five years of the working middle class was written to get a little it's absolutely it became it became a debate about who the middle class would trust and if you looked at the exit polls . that that question had a significant advantage so. it sounds like what you're saying is that the silo ization of america is or the region in the region of education i don't know if an event if it's. even in our political world is becoming more and more. rigid as and and so it's just a matter of pulling those people out. what what accounts for that rigidity is this the silo ization of our media is it that the republicans are all watching fox news

the democrats are all. watching m s n b c that's that's that's part of it people now tend to live in areas where there are like minded people i mean there are some political demographers and geographers who have looked at this and there is a kind of what they call sorting out geographically where people live. but there also is this this ability to now live in a world in which you get and give information from like minded people or from like minded sources and so if you if you if you want to go through life without having your views challenge it in a way you can easily do that and in fact that tends to reinforce the attitudes that people have so the degree to which the media has fractured i mean there's no there's no single media. operation that now has the kind of influence that we used to see you know three decades ago when it was n.b.c. a.b.c. and c.b.s. that created a community discussion in those days are long gone and so it has it has left us in

a much different situation and and therefore those lines become rigid i don't know whether there's anything on the horizon that's going to move us away from that i think we are in this period for now it took a while to get here it seems to be for now the way we are it's almost a pretty civil war kind of thing and it's it's you can spend eternity with the internet you can spend a half hour an hour two hours three hours reading a whole variety of media websites and have them all be on the laughter all be on the right and i debate conservatives on this program and on my radio program regularly and it astounds me how often i don't know their buzzwords and they don't know mine i mean that literally we're living in different worlds that when the whole benghazi thing you know when they're all i started cranking that stuff up i didn't have a clue what was going on and i had republicans coming on and they just drop a couple of words and just figure debate over you know and so what i mean we we very much talk past people and there's another thing that that struck me during the campaign when i was out talking to voters and then. it is if you would ask somebody

who was a mitt romney supporter what do you think is at stake in this election what happens if barack obama gets reelected to a second term. their view was that there was almost apocalyptic i mean that this was in a sense the end of the america that they believed in the america that they felt had made you know this country the envy of the world if you talk to people who were barack obama supporters and ask them the exact same question their view of mitt romney winning coupled with the republicans having control of the house and perhaps taking over the senate was similarly dire in their view was that republicans would take this country and they would undermine so many of the gains of much of the progress that they have seen well you look at north carolina right now and i think there's some legitimacy that well i mean we're seeing i mean we're i mean we're paralysis in washington but in the states you have red governance and you have blue governments and states are going in different directions as developed and put into

law single payer health care system they're just waiting for it to be allowed under obamacare and north carolina is aggressively disenfranchising people and not taking medicare money and it's you know it could be characterized negatively or positively on both sides i suppose right each side either side believes that the path it is following is for the greater good sure sure and i think that we have to acknowledge that in the context of not necessarily vilifying people but rather identifying those perspectives but i think it's kind of a balkanization well it is a challenge is how do you i mean how do you how do you how do you talk of how do you talk through that how do you how do you get people to reengage on those larger questions and to some extent you know i called this book collision two thousand and twelve because it was a collision between the america that elected barack obama in two thousand and eight and the and the america that elected republicans to control the house in two thousand and ten two parties with very different views about some of the basic questions facing the country you look to a presidential election to help resolve those differences and yet. partly because

the candidates never quite stepped up to it but also because the passions were so deeply felt that we got through the selection and even though the president was a fairly clean victory and a big victory in the electoral college it didn't change much. which which speaks. well of twenty fourteen twenty sixteen it seems. check out the book collision two thousand and twelve romney versus obama obama versus romney in the future of elections in america dan thanks for masturbates thank you tom if you argue with me on the left article that's. what the obama said back to the phones on mr miller yep it's always like. for the guys politically correct that i'm correcting fox so-called news earlier this month governor jerry brown of california signed into law a measure that prohibits public schools in that state from barring transgender

students access to school facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms and to athletic teams that correspond with their gender identity since brown signed the bill fox so-called news has launched an all out fear mongering its act to smear the law and we gotta take a look. students as young as kindergartners will be able to choose whether they would like to use the boys or girls restrooms based on their gender identity. those opposed say we're going too far with students it actually hurts the general population as a whole they say the kids could take advantage of this and parents will have to start worrying about boys showering with girls and vice versa i don't even know where to begin what do we do with the seven year old girl that goes into the locker room and there's a fourteen year old boy naked in the girls' locker room because that's where he

choose. i think that's all of the problem here is that all of the concerns about the law that foxes are raised are based on a high oil highly flawed conservative talking point really a bigoted talking point for instance there is no credible research not even common sense that would suggest that male students are going to pretend to be transgender so that they can sneak into a girl's bathroom and these conservative talking points help to fuel look the ras front and the abuse that many transgender children and adults face each and every day rather than having a serious discussion about the law and its implications fox chose to use their talking heads to disperse mountains of misinformation and that's why the so called news network has been politically correct.

in cuba is not a failure of the cuban people it's a failure of adel castro in a. one zero sum summation. by the officials both hostility and suspicion encouraged by the government these operations against cuba are known to the attorney general of the united states. the defendants intelligence arms how to infiltrate to resist. freedom fighters terrorists. who who is.

no real terrorist please stand up on our cheek. and.

put it on your arm and a lot of these. face. pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm sure. furtherance conversations with great minds i'm joined by dr cornel west a self described champion of justice through the traditions of the black church dr west is one of america's most important public intellectuals and a fierce advocate for democracy he currently serves as the professor of philosophy and christian practice at union theological seminary.